Michael Truell: Building Cursor At 23, Taking On GitHub Copilot & Advice To Engineering Students

TL;DR

Michael Truell co-founded Cursor after a series of failed startup ideas (mechanical engineering CAD copilot, encrypted messaging), pivoting to AI-assisted coding despite GitHub Copilot’s dominance. Cursor grew from $0 to ~$1M ARR in 2023 and from ~$1M to $100M in 2024 by focusing solely on product quality and word-of-mouth, not growth engineering.

Key insights

• Truell got into programming by trying to build a mobile game with his brother, starting with Objective C in Xcode; his brother quit, but Truell kept going.
• Early AI work included a failed robotic dog project where he and a friend implemented their own tiny neural network library from scratch because microcontrollers couldn’t run standard ML libraries (To
• The first real startup idea was a copilot for mechanical engineers using CAD systems (SolidWorks, Fusion 360) – chosen because they thought it would be “boring and uncompetitive” – but they had no dom